A recent trend is for companies to actively try to help employees improve life at home, with many of these companies claiming that this is a form of social responsibility toward their employees, sometimes referred to as “internal stakeholders.” According to management professor David Lewis at UCLA, this represents “a growing effort by American business to reward people with time and peace of mind instead of more traditional financial tools like stock options and bonuses.” Consider the following:

• ▪ Evernote, a software company, pays each of its 250 employees—from receptionists to top executives—to have their homes cleaned twice a month.

• ▪ Facebook provides each employee who becomes a new parent with $4,000 to help with expenses.

• ▪ Stanford School of Medicine offers doctors not only housecleaning but also in-home dinner delivery.

• ▪ Genentech helps parents with take-home dinners, housecleaning, and last-minute babysitting for a sick child.

• ▪ Deloitte, the consulting firm, offers employees a wide array of family support services including backup care for workers with sick family members, personal trainers, nutritionists, and 24-hour counseling services “on demand” for family-related problems such as marital strife and infertility.

• ▪ Patagonia, a clothing company based in Ventura, California, is legendary for its environmental focus. It is beloved by its employees, who enjoy an almost unparalleled degree of autonomy and flexibility. According to its CEO Yvon Chouinard, for every opening at Patagonia, the company has an average of 900 applicants. With a high percentage of women employees, the company tries to offer perks that are particularly attractive to working women. In the words of Chouinard, “One gets pregnant, I can’t afford to lose her. The average cost to replace an employee is $50,000, including headhunter fees, lost productivity, training. So I say, put in child care. Give people flextime. Let my people go breastfeeding, for God’s sake. Before we had a child care center, employees came to work with their babies and kept them on their desks in cardboard boxes.”